. . . it's complicated . . .

On Reaching Oxwich Bay: A Collaboration of Thoughts

This world is not worthy of me.
No, that’s not right,
that’s not what I had meant to say.But you must have thought it?
…to have said it?Yes.

I was wondering if people see things the way I do.
Those rock outcrops for example,
the way they break through the varied hues
of leafy greens.You keep lifting your sunglasses from your eyes.Why? Do you not trust the colours?

I was just checking that’s all.
The smell of gorse is overwhelming don’t you think?Coconut and warm butter?
Sweet dessert wine perhaps?
I feel a need to stretch out on the warm sand.
The beach is too long, too beige.

You can’t be bothered, is that what you’re saying?
To get to the end?
Where the hotel interrupts the natural world
with the clatter of stainless cutlery
and the overfed whelps of day-trip visitors?You could put it that way I guess.

The tide will wash away our footsteps.
Remember the burial chamber and lime kilns?
The stone ruins of Pennard Castle on the hill?You wondered if Dylan Thomas had written about them.
I wondered did I see things in the same way.As Thomas?

In a way.
It’s difficult to say.
Look, the cattle have followed us down The Pill.It comes from the Welsh word ‘pwl’meaning an inlet, harbour, or pool like a creek or tidal inlet off a river or channel.

Very bucolic. A pastoral poem no less.
You know I should’ve said
I’m not worthy of this world.A slip of the tongue?
My footsteps don’t fit with the past.
They will never add anything more.

Is that good or bad?
I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?
My words cannot compare to that stonechat’s song.
His voice and beauty overwhelms me,
throws me out to sea and drowns me.
Another passer-by will take my place in time.

(After a weekend walk on South Gower, Wales between Southgate and Oxwich:
A Collaboration of Thoughts is a conversation between myself and my inner voice
whilst following in the imagined footsteps of Dylan Thomas and all those who may
have passed that way before me and will pass in the future. Sunday was also International Dylan Thomas Day – the anniversary of the date when Under Milk
Wood was first read on stage at 92Y The Poetry Center, New York in 1953)